Down the Lost Highway
By Emily Esfahani-Smith | Sunday, April 6, 2008
President James Wright is grooming Dean of Faculty Carol Folt to succeed him as President, and the Board— compliant as ever—will almost certainly allow Dean Folt to continue President Wright’s divisive policies. Of course, all those that value the Dartmouth experience are relieved to recall President Wright’s numerous failures in trying to turn our school into a bureaucratic fiefdom of dwarfs. Now in his last stand, we are hoping President Wright’s string of losses continues in court, where there are already indications that the board-packing plan was a violation of contract. Given that the Wright administration has something of a predilection for dealing from the bottom of the deck, as shown in the board-packing fiasco, the Review thinks that Dean Folt should not follow in James Wright’s footsteps and assume the throne at Parkhurst.
Dean Folt not only has the reputation of being one of President Wright’s closest associates but, even then, of being accustomed to getting jerked around on a very short leash. Word has it that, in her diminutive way, she is far too easily yanked around—by James Wright, by big donors looking to micromanage their children’s grades, and, not easily forgotten, the Chairman of Dartmouth’s Board, Charles “Ed” Haldeman.
Dean Folt has wagged her way behind President Wright from big speech to speech and even tags along when President Wright meets with the big Kahunas on the Board of Trustees. The latter point is truly remarkable. We suppose the Board can invite whomever they want to their meetings, but Board meetings have a reputation of being insular and secretive: Board members take an oath of office and generally cannot dish the goings-on of Board meetings out to the public. Nobody knows what goes on during the meetings except the Board, which includes the President as an ex officio member. The assumption is that only Board members should attend Board meetings. Not being President, Dean Carol Folt can be no more than someone else’s date in attending.
As it is, bad news travels fast, and the catastrophe of Dean Folt’s achievements has been spreading beyond the Board room. In a recent poll conducted by Dartmouth Undying, a group of alumni who are critical of the Association of Alumni’s suit against the College, one curious question was included in the poll: what is your attitude towards Carol Folt. Now why would they want to know that? We can only imagine the responses given to that loaded question. We have heard, for instance, in private conversations that at least three current faculty members are categorically opposed to Dean Folt’s promotion. One of these faculty members has the audacity to describe himself as a good friend of Dean Folt’s. So who needs enemies?
But people who do not know her well—or who swoon when confronted with chichi political fashions—will undoubtedly love the idea of Carol Folt as president: Dartmouth names its first woman president at the same time that the nation puts forward its first serious female candidate. She’s a scientist (remember why Lawrence Summers got the boot at Harvard: in your face, Larry!); she’s well published; she knows the right people. It’s great. And yet, like President Wright, she has stated absolutely no core vision for the direction this College should take, and again like Wright, there’s no action in the way she works, there’s just reaction. What have been Dean Folt’s major initiatives here at Dartmouth? What has she added to the College in her 24 years here? Seniority does not an executive make.
Indeed, it seems more accurate to say that Dean Folt has subtracted, not added, to this campus. More star professors have left this campus under Dean Folt’s reign as Dean of Faculty than ever should under the tenure of one Dean. In one case, the faculty member left as a direct result of Dean Folt’s interference and violation of his academic freedom. We direct your attention to the Arthur R. Virgin Professor of Music Jon Appleton. In 2005, when students complained about receiving grades below an A in his Music 3 class, Dean Folt took it upon herself to nullify the grades of all 76 students, and grant each student mere credit for the course instead. For the record, the breakdown of grades was as follows: 30 As, 25 Bs, 15 Cs, and 4 Ds—which might strike a reasonable individual as rather fair-minded. Allegedly, Dean Folt’s office was influenced by a phone call from a large donor, who just happened to be the parent of one very peeved student.
Dean Folt’s misguidance extends beyond violations of academic freedom; her sketchy judgment also seems to violate the basic dictates of a liberal arts education. In 2005, the College’s sole professor of rhetoric left for Virginia Tech due, it is said, to administrative neglect and abuse. His frustrated efforts to promote a rhetoric and writing center for the College between 1995 and 2005 forced him to conclude that Dean Folt is “utterly ignorant of the role of rhetoric within a liberal arts tradition.” Ignorance of this sort is probably inexcusable in the Dean of Faculty, but personal resentment is absolutely unacceptable: Professor Kuypers said that in 2005 Folt “resolutely stated that…were she to have extra [resources and funds], she would not give any to speech.”
Now that Professor Kuypers is gone and student and alumni pressure, via petition candidates, continues, Dean Folt has had a change of heart and her office has decided to found an Institute of Writing and Rhetoric after all. It makes you wonder if her opposition to fund the Institute in 2005 was prompted by a resource problem, or by a personal problem: her personal antipathy to Professor Kuypers—if true, that type of behavior has become a pattern at the College in the past few years. Specifically, if professors, great people in their fields and often in life, take a stand against the administration in any way, they are punished in one of two forms: by the denial of tenure—like Kuypers—or the denial of research funding. Is this the attitude…is this the policy we should expect of the future president of the College?
And it doesn’t stop there: while Dean Folt has been on board, all-star professors have been hitting the pavement. Down the lost highway, as Hank Williams would say. Professor Michael Gazzaniga, Professor Allan Stam, Professor Jon Appleton, Professor Jennifer Richeson, and Professor Amitabh Chandra, to name a few—we won’t go into the depressing specifics of each professor in this short editorial, but we can say that future Nobel laureates are included on this list, and that they were allegedly driven out of Dartmouth due to the “lack in intellectual leadership,” to quote Professor Appleton once more.
You know that Dartmouth is experiencing a crisis of leadership when the tenure of the last president, James Wright, was marked more by a hold-the-fort mentality than a liberal look into Dartmouth’s past and future, and the tenure of the president before him, Freedman, was marked by a mean-spirited vendetta against this paper and free speech in general. Here is a chance to renew our leadership, and the College should embrace that opportunity: search for a President who is truly bold, innovative, imaginative and prepared to challenge the politically correct canards of this shop-worn academy. Dartmouth needs a President who is wholly devoted to and can once again establish the hallmarks of a liberal arts education. The College needs someone fresh, outside the ranks of the status quo and off the leash.
Sometimes, under some circumstances, an exceptional executive can gather the flock together, retire magnanimously and gracefully, and ask his Board to name his proven protégé as his successor. Is James Wright such an executive? Some like to pretend he is; the rest of us know better; the rest of us know that this is the time for President Wright to ride off into the sunset, down that lost highway.
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